Thread: Anandtech News

After last week's broad, sweeping post about Windows on ARM, the Building Windows 8 team is back to discussing the nuts and bolts of the operating system - today, Microsoft's Jennifer Norberg discusses enhancements made to accessibility tools in Windows 8. Chief among the new announcements is a set of baseline accessibility requirements that Windows Store apps must meet before being declared "accessible."
These requirements, which mainly focus on presenting information to users in a clear and simple fashion, can be implemented mostly through standard WinRT-supported languages like HTML5, JavaScript, XAML, and others. Apps created using project templates in Visual Studio Express use code that is already "accessibility ready," and the program's IntelliSense feature can also be used to type (and declare) accessibility information more quickly as you code. Once a developer's app is deemed "accessible," it can be marked as such in the Windows Store to make it more easily searchable.
Microsoft has also made efforts to give developers consistent APIs to use when programming Metro-style apps - the company says that developers (both of standard apps that need to use accessibility features, and of apps designed themselves to enhance accessibility) should be able to depend on on the "UI Automation" accessibility API to communicate with Wndows' accessibility tools more seamlessly than in the past, when developers would sometimes have to code their own methods and workarounds into their programs.
Other enhancements focus on improving on existing technologies: the Windows Narrator, which reads text on the screen back to the user, now performs better, includes additional voices and languages, can be configured to speak more quickly or slowly, can read more content on pages loaded in Internet Explorer, and can respond to user customizable keyboard commands. Narrator can also be invoked during Windows Setup to help with out-of-box setup or an upgrade install, and vision-impaired users on touch-enabled devices can have Narrator read what your finger is touching before activating it.

The Windows Magnifier, another existing tool, has been adapted to work better on touch-enabled computers - it can now be invoked by pressing the Windows logo key and the volume up button, which zooms in and brings up on-screen borders that can be used to change your focus.
The full post, which is linked below for your convenience, covers these topics in greater depth - read on if you're interested.
Source: Building Windows 8 Blog



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With the launch of Tahiti behind them, AMD is now firing on all cylinders to get the rest of their Southern Islands lineup out the door. Typically we’d see AMD launch their GPUs in descending order of performance, but this time AMD is taking a slight detour. Rather than following up the Tahiti based 7900 series with the Pitcairn based 7800 series, AMD is instead going straight to the bottom and launching the Cape Verde based 7700 series first.
Today AMD will be launching two cards based on the Cape Verde GPU: the Radeon HD 7750, and the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. As the Juniper based 5700 series never got a proper Northern Islands successor, this is the first real update for the x700 series since the launch of the 5700 series in October of 2009. Given the success of the 5700 expectations are going to be high, and to fulfill those expectations AMD will be bringing to bear their new GCN architecture along with a full node jump with TSMC’s 28nm process. But will this be enough to enable the 7700 series to replicate the success of the 5700 series? Let’s find out.

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We have had epic discussions with quite a few readers about the importance of virtualization in our reviews. In our six-core Opteron review we wrote:
"Let there be no misunderstanding: how well a new Server CPU handles virtualization determines whether it is a wallflower or a blockbuster."

Even back in 2008, IDC expected that 52% of the servers were bought for virtualization. But in other reports you find numbers that are significantly lower. For example, more recently (April 2011) IDC reported that about 20% of all newly bought servers were virtualized.
No doubt there is some confusion between buying a server for virtualization and the numbers of workloads that find a home in a VM. IDC reports (Dec 2010) that more than 70% of the applications are running inside a VM. But there is more.
The 20% virtualized servers number seems low, but you have to drill down a bit in the data. First of all, when we focus on the "mature" markets (US, Europe, Japan, Parts of Asia) the percentage of virtualized servers rises to 30%. And if you then take into account that a few players, such as Google (installed base of 1 million servers), facebook (100k+ servers) and Intel (100k+ servers) are buying massive amount of non-virtualized servers, you can understand the percentage of virtualized servers is a lot higher among the rest of the server buyers. In other words, if you would do a survey among the server buyers (instead of looking at the server volumes), the percentage of people buying a server for virtualization is much higher.
And indeed, when we talked to several analysts they indicated that if you ignore the Googles and Facebooks of this earth, the virtualization rate of servers might be as high as 70%.
Not convinced yet? Well, luckily for us Canonical did a survey among 6000 (!) users of Ubuntu Server. And interestingly, 50% of the respondents responded that they use Ubuntu server as a guest OS inside a VM, virtualized thus. Although this is only a (small) part of the total server market, it is another datapoint that gives us an idea what these Opteron and Xeon boxes are used for.

Interestingly, VMware and not Xen or KVM were the most used hypervisors.
To summarize, the percentages of servers bought for virtualization reported by IDC and others are heavily influenced by Google and other "Cloud" buyers. We suspect that a much higher percentage (than the quoted 30%) of the server buyers among our readers consider the virtualized benchmarks as the most important ones.

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LaCie showcased their 2big Thunderbolt drive at CES 2012 and it has now started shipping.

Specifications of LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Series
Capacities	4TB and 6TB (and 8TB)
Rounds per minute (rpm)	7200rpm
Maximum Read Speed	327MB/s
Maximum Write Speed	320MB/s
Connectivity	2x Thunderbolt
Dimensions (WxHxD)	3.5" x 6.7" x 7.8" (9.1 x 17.2 x 20.0 cm)
Price	$649 (4TB) and $799 (6TB)

The LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Series is essentially the LaCie Little Big Disk in 3.5" form factor. It has two swappable 3.5" drives whereas the Little Big Disk has two 2.5" drives. 3.5" drives offer larger capacities and better performance, particularly with hard drive. The 2big is rated at transfer speeds up to 327MB/s while the Little Big Disk tops out at 190MB/s (both results are for the non-SSD versions). LaCie has an 8TB model on their site as well but there is no price listed, which suggests that it's not shipping yet.
There are also two Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining, so you can daisy-chain several 2bigs or other Thunderbolt devices. The 2big most likely uses the same SATA controller as the Little Big Disk, which means you are limited to two SATA 3Gb/s ports. For the standard configuration this isn't an issue, but people who are interested in swapping the hard drives for SSDs should be aware that the SATA controller will be a potential bottleneck with the fastest SATA 6Gb/s SSDs.



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Microsoft’s Jonathan Garrigues has detailed some aspects of the submissions process for the upcoming Windows Store on the company’s Windows Store for Developers blog. The post describes in detail the various steps involved in the app submission process, and Microsoft’s efforts to address developer complaints about its competitors’ storefronts.
Most of Microsoft’s efforts focus on transparency: they want app developers to be aware of the approval process before they ever submit any code, and they want developers who have submitted apps to be able to track those apps through every step of the submission process. Each step in the process is described, both in terms of what the steps entail and how much time the step usually takes. The submission procedure is mostly automated and focuses on validating code and making sure it runs, but ultimately depends on a human being to launch your app, verify that it works and that it does not violate any of Microsoft’s policies, and verify that it does not contain any malicious code.
Visual Studio will include some features that work toward these ends, including a feature that will allow developers to reserve a name for their app before the app is actually ready for submission to the store. Microsoft will also supply a Windows App Certification Kit that automatically goes through your code to make sure that your app launches and meets a set of basic requirements – the certification kit can be run locally and corresponds to one of the stages of Microsoft’s certification process, meaning that if your app passes this test it stands a better chance of being allowed on the Windows Store.
As is often the case with Microsoft’s latter-day offerings, the Windows Store is trying to find a place in between Apple and Google’s respective app stores for the iOS and Android platforms: it wants to maintain some aspects of Android’s openness and flexibility with the added benefit of iOS’s safety and freedom from malware while at the same time steering clear of Apple’s obscure and sometimes fickle approval process. While Microsoft’s system does result in a “walled garden,” the company hopes that the Windows Store’s relative transparency about the approval process pleases longtime Win32 developers and newcomers alike.
For more on this process, you can read the full post - it is linked below for your convenience.
Source: Windows Store for Developers Blog



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Late last year, we took a look at the ASRock CoreHT 252B, a Sandy Bridge-based midrange HTPC. We liked the CoreHT quite a bit, noting that the small form factor HTPC was a solid choice for most users in this segment. It hit all the key points, though it didn’t do anything in particular to set itself apart from the rest of the SFF crowd. Our main complaints centered around the hard drive performance, and to that end comes the ASRock CoreHT Server.

It’s very similar to the CoreHT we reviewed before, even sharing nearly the same specs. The one major difference: there’s two 500GB HDDs in the place of one, configured in RAID 0. Other than that, there’s the same mobile Sandy Bridge internals, headlined by the HM67 chipset and Core i5-2410M processor. Read on to find out if this update addresses our earlier concerns of if we're still left wanting more.


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Using several media outlets, Apple has just announced major details about Mac OS X 10.8, the next version of the company's desktop operatng system. The new release, codenamed "Mountain Lion," will be available to people with Mac developer accounts soon in the form of a preview, and a release to the public is expected late this summer. This short development cycle, unheard of since the early days of Mac OS X over a decade ago, reflects a desire at Apple to mirror the roughly yearly release cycle of iOS.
Despite the name, which suggests a version relatively light in feature changes over the previous version (like the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard), Mountain Lion is intended to be a major new feature release that continues the work of bringing iOS features to the Mac: many of its major features are iOS transplants, including the Notification Center (which will bring unified notifications to OS X, replacing third-party apps like Growl), Game Center, iMessage support (in the form of an app called Messages, which replaces iChat - there's a free beta available for Lion users now), AirPlay Mirroring, a Notes app, Reminders, Twitter integration, tighter iCloud integration, and others. Frankly, this list of iOS imports actually seems to make more sense for the Mac as a platform than did some of the features (like Launchpad) that were brought over in Lion.
Mountain Lion will also include some new features all its own: Gatekeeper, which is aimed straight at system administrators, will allow admins to lock down the type of apps allowed to run on Macs. You can choose to allow apps only from the Mac App Store, apps from the Mac App store as well as those from developers you approve, or apps from anywhere (which is the default behavior in OS X currently). This can be seen as another step toward disallowing non-Mac App Store programs from running in OS X, but taken at face value it appears to be a solid compromise between the security of iOS-like behavior and the flexibility to install code from anywhere that users have always been accustomed to in OS X.
We don't have any information about system requirements yet, so we don't know whether Mountain Lion will run on any Lion-compatible Mac (which seems technically possible) or whether it will drop support for some older machines (which has historically happened with new OS X releases - see this page of our Lion review for in-depth information on what got dropped from the support list and why). The Apple developer site is currently down, but as soon as it comes back up those with developer accounts should be able to download and play with the next version of OS X. We'll continue to cover the new OS as details are made public.
Source: The Verge



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While Alienware isn't openly inviting comparisons to Microsoft's Xbox 360 with their brand new X51 gaming desktop, it's hard not to see the resemblance, at least in form factor. But where Microsoft's aging console continues trudging away with generations old hardware, Alienware has produced an authentic Windows 7 gaming PC in a shell roughly the same size. Not only that, but they're introducing it at one of the lowest prices we've ever seen for what's ordinarily a very premium brand.

Was Alienware able to cram a fully-powered machine in this tiny chassis, or were too many sacrifices made? Just what exactly can you fit into this console-esque chassis? Read on for our full analysis!


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True to their word, Acer is announcing the availability of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for their recently launched A200 tablet. We posted the PR blurb about the A200 in early January, and we were able to get some hands on time with the A200 at CES 2012. The quick summary is that Acer has trimmed a few features from the A500, like the rear-facing camera and HDMI port, but they also changed up the industrial design. While the plastic exterior may not sound as impressive as the aluminum shell of the A500, the reality is that in hand the textured plastic actually feels better (at least in our opinion).
As far as the Ice Cream Sandwich update, while Acer’s press release states that they’re updating all of the Iconia line to Android 4.0 (including the A100, A200, and A500), the reality of the updates isn’t quite so impressive. The update is currently being pushed to Iconia A200 customers (it’s not clear if you can get it faster by checking for a system update or not) and should be completed over the coming week. A100 and A500 users eager to get the ICS update on the other hand will have to wait a while longer—April to be precise.
Besides all the Android 4.0 goodness, there are a few features that are unique to Acer. Chief of these is their Acer Ring, allowing you to navigate directly to apps from the lock screen. While the idea is nice, in practice we haven’t found the Acer Ring to be necessary and at least the one time I looked at it, it felt a bit chunky and sluggish to launch and navigate (though I could say the same for Android 3.x in general on Tegra 2 hardware). The only other extra feature Acer mentions is an improved weather widget.
You can read more about ICS in our Galaxy Nexus review, though obviously there will be some differences when running on a Tegra 2 tablet. It should provide a better UI experience on Tegra 2 tablets, but unfortunately unless you’re one of the users that purchased an A200, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The A200 8GB is currently selling for $330 while the 16GB model goes for $350. However, at this late stage in the life of Tegra 2, we wouldn’t recommend buying a new tablet running Tegra 2 hardware unless the price is under $200, especially considering Tegra 3 tablets are expected to hit sub-$300 prices in the very near future.
Gallery: Acer Updates Iconia Tablets to Android 4.0





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We recently re-entered the world of peripheral reviews, specifically mechanical keyboards with our brief rundown of Rosewill's RK-9000 mechanical keyboard (complete with Cherry MX Blue switches). Rosewill's design was as basic as it gets, but the keyboard felt solid and for many of us there's just no substitute for a mechanical switch when it comes to having a comfortable typing experience. But our visit with Rosewill was just a warm up.

Today we have Corsair's Vengeance K60 and K90 gaming keyboards in house. Corsair opts to use Cherry MX Red switches in an effort to find a more suitable balance between typing and gaming needs, and they bring a little more style and class than we're used to seeing in gaming peripherals. Read on for our impressions of the K60 and K90 keyboards.


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